Unfortunately, that "Orange Bubbleator" is not the the original Bubbleator from 1962.

Wendy, the concierge at the Mayfair Park Hotel, who created the "Orange Bubbleator", did however give me the recipe for it:

2 slices of fresh orange, muddled
2 slices of fresh lemon, muddled
Add ice
1 ounce of Ketel One Citron
1 ounce of Smirnoff Vanilla
Shake and strain with juice of orange and lemon for color into chilled martini glass
1 ounce of Champagne or Sparkling wine to top off
Garnish with twist of orange

This is however definitely something she created and it is NOT from 1962.

So I'm still looking for the original.

Come on Seattleites - how can you have forgotten such a key part of your history???
_________________Toto, j'ai l'impression que nous ne sommes plus au Kansas !

I've lived in Seattle my entire life and (lightly) collected/looked at Fair books and I've never seen a cocktail menu from the Fair, from any location. Here's what I can do: They're doing a "The Next Fifty" celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Fair, and there's a little museum dedicated to Fair items. I've been through but didn't see a Space Needle menu. I'll go visit again, ask around, and see if anyone involved knows this recipe, or any others.

I don't remember if the Needle's new restaurant, SkyCity (which has excellent food, unlike the old Eye Of The Needle and Emerald Suite it replaced) has any specialty cocktails with a vintage flair, as it's been at least a year since I ate there, but I can ask them as well. They did bring back the Lunar Lander dessert, a sundae in a double dish, the lower half filled with crushed dry ice; just before it leaves the waiter's stand, they pour warm water in the outer bowl, and it floods fog over your table.

For those not versed in Seattle World's Fair history, the Bubbleator was an elevator formed as a gigantic sphere, made of a metal framework with big plastic panels. It rode on a relatively thin riser shaft, no tracks, cables or other equipment spoiling the 'floating bubble' look. Even the operator's console had a little galaxy of bubbles with lights inside. This was inside the Coliseum (now Key Arena) to take people up into a huge cloud made of hundreds of aluminum cubes for the World of Tomorrow exhibit. It later ended up in the Food Circus (ex-Armory) building, was replaced in the 80s by a conventional elevator, and was sold off for scrap-- except that a guy from neighboring Auburn, who didn't want to see it destroyed, bought it and turned it into a greenhouse in his yard.

I am surprised no one seems to remember this cocktail recipe, given that it was made specially for the Fair and countless thousands of people drank it. (Or was it so awful no one WANTS to remember it?)

Major apologies. Nobody seemed to know. And then the exhibit closed. The people staffing it were mostly just staffing the exhibit.

Sort of like the time the Seattle Center hosted an exhibit on MAD Magazine. I thought I'd make some friends and asked the guys working if they knew the rules to Three-Cornered Pitney. They looked at me like I'd grown an extra head.

Where did you find a reference to a bubbleator cocktail? The cocktail menu for the Space Needle had around six fair-oriented drinks but none on it called a bubbleator. These drinks also had their own mugs, at least shown on the menu. Do you know what dinning area it was served in? Was it "virgin"?

But really how did you come across the drink in the first place? I may know a place to search for it but it could take many hours of thumbing through clipping and ephemera and I could use a starting point for another of my wild goose chases.